Blue Ridge Ruby: A Couple of Reflections

Oh Asheville! How wonderful, weird, and full of art you are! Aside from returning with sore shins (central Ohio isn’t known for its hills…), Adam and I head home from North Carolina with two primary reflections we feel worth sharing here.

1. “Humans are the X-factor”. There’s something irreplaceable about a gathering of humans in-person; something unmistakably creative and promising. Something you feel more than you can describe; a moment where the whole is indeed greater than its constituent components. Small Ruby conferences ooze this feeling! My point here is simply that there is no replacement for in-person gatherings, and you will leave having gained something. Friendships, ideas, insights, and a sense of identity in community way beyond a Slack workspace or forum. There is so much value there! We all already know this — there’s a reason remote-only meetups can feel chore-ish and paradoxically disconnecting. Humans are the X-factor. They have to show up, but the rewards never fail to arrive when they do.

To that end, we can’t help but feel great joy at the resurgence of the small, single-track, regional Ruby conference. There’s a place for RubyConf and Rails World and the “big show”, for sure. But that human X-factor doesn’t scale linearly. Smaller regional conferences don’t need much production, keep everyone in the same room, and clearly relay the genuine love the conference planners have for their community. Yet they always have insights just as deep and compelling as the bigger conferences… and you can grab lunch with the speakers right after their talk! If you haven’t been to Blue Ridge, Rocky Mountain, Blastoff, or RailsCamp, seriously consider making the trip!

2. There has never been a better time to build. There are a lot of takes floating around about AI and software development right now. BRR hosted a two-hour round-table discussion on exactly that! Adam and I have had more than our own share of discussions around it and what the future looks like. We don’t know. Nobody does! But one slide from Ernesto Tagwerker at the conference contained the simple equation:

And I think that sums up my current outlook on AI for Ruby/Rails right now. If you have experience in the stack, come in with opinions on what you want and exactly how you want it shaped, and opt to use Claude or Codex to execute/implement, you’re going to find that you can build at unprecedented speed. But the quality of the output, at this point, is going to governed more by how detailed and particular your input is, not by the quality of the model. The models are shockingly good. They can follow your opinions, build your ideas, and refactor entire codebases in minutes.

Let me rewind and repeat that: if you can leverage your experience and knowledge of the stack to write clear and concise specifications about what you’d like built, it can be built in minutes for you. At stunning accuracy. Truly, there has never been a better time to build things for those who want to build.

This was inadvertently on display at Blue Ridge. Katya Sarmiento (a wonderful human!) scaffolded up a fully custom app just for Blue Ridge, “[what] started as an app for BRR Ruby Embassy… turned into a whole companion app called ‘My Blue Ridge’” — complete with user-specific scheduling, group meal coordination, and even a fun data-report that was added minutes before her lightning talk about that very thing! This sort of thing was absolutely possible before software development AI came on the scene but it would’ve had a much higher human-time cost (and likely wouldn’t have been possible to do for a volunteer venture like Blue Ridge). If your desire is to build things, the landscape is wide open.

Anyway, to the Blue Ridge team of Jeremy, Mark, and Joe, thanks for another wonderful conference!